Sprinz Printed Glass Tiles and Shower Doors
28 September 2009
“Making Big Ones out of the Small Ones”
The whole concept of bathroom designs, as I see it, is to bring to this humble, functional room an air of luxury, of retreat, of a place to rest and refurbish. The problem with that, though, for people like me and the wife, and I suspect, many of those who read these blogs, is finding the space in which to do such things. Our bathrooms measure all of five feet by nine feet. Sound familiar? So, what do you do with something like that? Expanding them is always a choice, of course, but if, like us, you have rejected that possibility because of the horrendous cost often engendered by such projects, you’re left with the cracker boxes with which you began. All I can do with such a space, as I once told my wife, is make of it a jewel box. The problem with that idea, of course, is actually doing it!
In writing these blogs these many months, though, I have encountered any number of ideas that would do much to dress up even a bathroom as small as the ones we have. There are wonderful showers, vessel sinks in an absolutely incredible array of sizes, shapes, materials, and configurations, and vanities too many to mention. The other item that never ceases to amaze me is tile, but not my father’s tile, that drab monochrome six-inch tile I grew up with. The tile these days just blows the cover off everything that has gone before, and nothing illustrates that better than the subject of today’s blog, namely, Sprinz, a fifth generation family-owned German firm that celebrates the glories of “living with glass.”
Sprinz has a number of lines of products from glass steps to glass doors to dividers to items for the kitchen and living room, but what has most blown my mind this time around is their 
ideas for the bathroom, namely their printed glass tiles and printed shower doors. They have actually found a way to produce high-quality, photo-realistic image printing on glass, both in tiles and doors, and the results are nothing short of stunning. But if you spend a little time on their site, it’s really not surprising. Well, the finished product is, but what is not surprising is that a firm with that kind of philosophy would be the one to come up with it.
What they have done is characterize kitchens, baths, and living rooms as “worlds,” and into each of these worlds they have introduced their concepts. The bathroom world is one, they say, of refuge and treasure, which, indeed, it is. And those who approach it that way end up with ideas that the rest of us can only wish might have been ours! What they have done, though, is create a line of products that will greatly enlarge and enhance any room in which they reside, and it would do much to make the smallest room in our home the largest, if only because of the amount of imagination then contained in it.
Joseph
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